One String To Bring Down Google Chrome

Google Chrome has comparatively been a more stable and efficient browser among various other browsers but one cannot be always so sure. And surely enough, a person named Andris Atteka discovered a seemingly simple bug or rather a simple string which can crash Chrome.

Atteka mentioned in his blog that by adding a NULL char in the URL string: http://biome3d.com/%%30%30 and hitting enter, one can completely crash Google’s browser.

Atteka reported the issue to Google via Chromium but since it was not a security issue, he did not get any reward which is usually the case with most tech companies. However the link could be still misused for causing unnecessary troubles as just hovering the mouse cursor over the link can cause the browser to crash.

After his discovery, Emil Protalinski from VentureBeat came up with an even smaller string of 10 characters http://a/%%30%30 which has the same effect of crashing that Chrome tab or the entire browser.

Both Chrome for Windows and Chrome for Mac are affected by this string leaving an exception of Chrome for Android which remained unaffected by the Null character in the string. It is not the first time though when Chrome is affected by any link.

In March this year, Mac users faced the similar problem when a 13-character link crashed their Chrome tabs and another link was discovered in April which crashed Chrome tabs in all the desktop platforms. Both the problems were resolved in no time though by Google.